Wednesday, 26 January 2011

After spending just over 3 weeks back in the UK, Leigh and I made our return to Finland last Monday. Being home was lovely; getting to see everyone I'd missed, catching up on terrible TV, fixing my food cravings, and getting some long overdue film developed!

Since getting back to Kuopio there has been a few minor problems in relation to what courses we wish to take this semester. Originally planning to study the jewelry, metal and precious stone workshop, we were confused when we arrived to class to be greeted by a lot of boys and some heavy metal welding... apparently the jewelry module was full up so they'd put us in the next best thing... Industrial Design. This was clearly not suited for what we wished to achieve this term, so we arranged a meeting with the head of textiles, Kaisa.

Although I wasn't very stimulated studying textiles here last term, I believe it was because I wasn't driving myself to try knew things enough. We decided that if we were to return to textiles, we should somehow see if we could incorporate ceramics into our work as it was something we both enjoyed from last term. However, after speaking to Kaisa it became obvious that there would be no way to fit this into our timetable, seeing as the whole 3rd semester is very written based and few workshops actually run. Disheartened, we decided to use our time to create some samples in the ceramics department anyway, while we arranged a meeting with the head of Ceramics, Merja, for the following week.

This meeting went much better; similar to textiles, the ceramics department also runs mainly academic-based modules within the 3rd term, although instead of suggesting we join these classes (as Kaisa did), Merja proposed that we make full use of the empty studios to work on an independent project. This was the best possible news to hear, as it was basically what we were going to ask her permission to do. The fact she suggested it to us without having to convince her at all was brilliant!

As no practical lessons are being held, we can use the empty workshops and kilns any time any day, and Merja will be giving no classes this term so she is free to come along and help us out whenever we need.

Our projects are to be marked in accordance to a work agreement she will write up for us, and by meeting the outcomes set by her we will gain our credits for this term.

I intend to explore the relationship between textiles and ceramics during this semester, experimenting with techniques and materials to pursue an innovate and interesting result!